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Garden in the City: No Sun? Gardening in the Shade Has Its Own Rewards

LINCOLN SQUARE — Picture a vegetarian at Ribfest.

Now you know what it feels like to be a shade gardener — a smorgasbord laid out before you, almost all of it off limits.

[Goatsbeard flower. All photos DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

For the longest time, I was in denial about my flower beds' sun exposure, or lack thereof.

I'd stroll through the aisles at the garden center drawn to dazzling plant after dazzling plant. So much prettiness and it all could be mine, the plastic tags promised, if only I could provide full or part sun.

My train of logic would proceed as follows:

Part sun equals part shade, which is pretty much the same as mostly shady. And really, what is shade anyway? I mean, as long as the sun hits the yard somewhere, don't those rays disperse? Ergo, I've got sun.

This is how I fooled myself, year after year, into purchasing sun-loving annuals and perennials and expecting them to take root in locations that could best be described as "sun-adjacent." But the plants weren't buying into my nonsense and predictably failed to thrive.

I finally gave up the ghost after coming across the actual definitions of full and part sun. Apparently "full" means at least six hours of direct sunlight (some plants will bask up to 14 hours if you let them). "Part" means a minimum of three to six hours of direct sunlight, preferably closer to six.

That settled it. I'm a shade gardener.

Patty Wetli with tips on how to make even the shadiest garden shine:

A mourning period followed for all the flowers that would never be. So long, asters. Nice knowing you, daisy. Buh-bye foxglove.

Then it was time to make peace with my shady lot. Like the song says, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

Figuring one mind trick is as good as another, I renamed my shadiest flower bed the "woodland area," conjuring up images of forests and fairies. Clearly I'm a sucker for the power of suggestion — this is my favorite space in the yard, where I'm most prone to zen-out when watering.

I've also come to appreciate plants' more subtle qualities, like the infinite variety of the color green and the texture and pattern of foliage as opposed to the brilliance of blooms.

[Japanese fern]

Trips to the garden center are now scavenger hunt, what with sunbathers outnumbering their shady counterparts by a ratio of what feels like 100 to one. Mercifully Gethesemane Garden Center, my usual haunt, puts its shady annuals in the shade, under a tent labeled "shade annuals." Frankly, there are some things you can't make too obvious.

I'd like to say I've done copious amounts of research into shade gardening, but regular readers of this column will appreciate that I've largely lucked into the discovery of perennials like masterwort, so nice I accidentally bought it twice years apart, and goatsbeard, my feathery-plumed king of the woodland.

[Masterwort]

For pops of color, I've renewed my relationship with no-fuss annuals like impatiens and begonias, which I had previously abandoned as too pedestrian, and made new acquaintances like the stunning caladium, which takes the colors red, green and white and mixes them in endlessly gorgeous combinations.

[Rex Begonia]

"It's impossible to choose, I want them all," I said to a fellow gardener as we both debated which variety to add to our carts.

Welcome to the dark side.

[Caladium]

Vegetable plot

Between the rain and my work schedule, I admit I've been somewhat neglectful of my vegetable patch. Thanks, Mother Nature, for picking up the watering slack. You can stop anytime now.

Dave and I did manage to agree rather peaceably on how to build an enclosure for our potatoes. We constructed it out of stakes and landscape cloth, which is actually metal. Think of it like chicken wire, only with smaller holes.

But we might have arrived at the solution too late. A couple of the potato plants have made like Roanoke and disappeared — they were there a week ago and now they're not — and the others grew so quickly we didn't have a chance to mound them properly.

"After all this, we're going to end up with two potatoes," Dave said.

I also reconfigured my beans and peppers from last year, and yet somehow still managed to put them right next to each other, with the bushy beans poised to once again stunt the peppers' growth.

New measure of success this gardening season: one red bell pepper by summer's end. And more than two potatoes.

Week-to-week comparison

 

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